Local government and innovation: The case of Italian provinces

Fortuna Casoria, Marianna Marino (), Pierpaolo Parrotta and Davide Sala ()
Additional contact information
Marianna Marino: SKEMA Business School
Davide Sala: University of Passau

No 2021-06, Discussion Paper series in Regional Science & Economic Geography from Gran Sasso Science Institute, Social Sciences

Abstract: This paper exploits quasi-natural experiments associated with three waves of reforms occurred in Italy in 1992, 2001 and 2004, to establish 8, 4, and 3 new provinces, respectively. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we find evidence of a significant detrimental effect of (further) decentralization on innovation in Northern and Central Italian provinces. We argue that this finding can be rationalized with the costs imposed by the “mafia transplantation†phenomenon, as we find that the new provinces that were more exposed to “mafiosi in confino†reduced their innovation output extensively. We perform a number of robustness checks that corroborate our main findings.

Keywords: local government; decentralization; innovation; mafia transplantation; difference-in-difference (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H72 K42 L20 O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2021-04, Revised 2021-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-ino, nep-isf, nep-law, nep-ore and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.gssi.it/images/DPRSEG_2021-06.pdf First version, 2020 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Local Government and Innovation: The Case of Italian Provinces (2021)
Working Paper: Local Government and Innovation: the case of Italian provinces (2021)
Working Paper: Local Government and Innovation: the case of Italian provinces (2020)
Working Paper: Local Government and Innovation: the case of Italian provinces (2019)
Working Paper: Local Government and Innovation: the case of Italian provinces (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ahy:wpaper:wp17

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper series in Regional Science & Economic Geography from Gran Sasso Science Institute, Social Sciences Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Andrea Ascani ().